Woody Allen, since 1971, if no farther back, had thirsted to make what he thought of as a "European" film, preferably in the monastic style of Ingmar Bergman. Finally he has made it, and contingently it resembles (at least in outline) the particular Bergman number [Autumn Sonata] which arrived almost at the same hour of release. (p. 60)

Impressed by the austerity of Bergman's style and by what he reads as Bergman's tragic view of life, he endangered his project at the outset; he was faced with the problem of imposing a Swedish ethos on urban American material. Bergman, since The Virgin Spring, has as often as possible shut out not only the world of nature but also the world of things and the world of society at large, so that his agonists can battle nakedly with each other (or with a surrogate God), undistracted by the alternative points of view or the cultural frivolities which tempt the commonality of mankind. Allen's film is far more populous than Autumn Sonata or any late film of Bergman; our comprehension of it is not delayed by a level of symbolic reference; it can be summarized as a story line that holds together. Motivation, however, is another matter. If Autumn Sonata is ambivalent because Bergman is playing a game with appearances, Interiors is eventually ambiguous because the calamities represented are in excess of the cause alleged.

Interiors should have been the tragedy (or even the comedy) of a man's attempt, alternately assisted or opposed by his three daughters, to win his own soul by ridding himself of their mother, his wife. I say "should have been" because Allen's conception of that man is so feeble (in the Bergman tradition of the ineffectual male) … that he emerges far less sympathetically than the compulsively meticulous wife…. (p. 62)

[The] whole embroilment is distorted by Allen's insistence on telling his story in a style alien to the milieu he provides, transposing the key of an American metropolitan setting into that of the hushed and claustrophobic atmosphere of Bergman's Baltic…. [Too much of the dialogue is] the sort of talk which, in earlier Woody Allen vehicles, would have speedily led to a verbal pratfall.

Allen tries harder—perhaps too hard—to keep his settings from becoming as cluttered as his language, staging crucial scenes at the dining table, in the bedroom, in an empty church, at a beach house, as a means of exiling the everyday world….

With every sequence he appears to have asked himself, not "How can I best shoot this?" but "How would Bergman shoot it?" And he ends his film with a strict reversion to the Bergman format which, at the same time, summons a whole repertory of understated curtain tableaux, post-Chekhov and Ibsen. (p. 63)

It has been said that the smothering family atmosphere in certain Bergman films appealed to Allen by reason of his special Jewish vulnerability to comparably oppressive parents in his own environment. I would not wish to pronounce on this probability, if probability it is, but I suspect that the driving force behind Allen's wistful Bergman-worship is rather a (Jewish?) love of perfection and a confusion of it with the Less-Is-More aesthetic of Scandinavian reductionism.

Be that as it may, the truth is that it takes more independent imagination, greater cinematic scope, a more vital sense of life-poetry to make Bonnie and Clyde, Mean Streets, or Badlands than it does to make Interiors. Centrally, what is Allen's film about? Certainly not about "the meaning of life"—a silly predication for any work of art. And though the rejected wife and mother kills herself, the film is in no awesome way about death. The people involved are not tragic, although some of them would like to be; they tend to be hysterical, obtuse, or pathetically abusive…. Is this what makes the film, for Allen, "more personal"?

Interiors is an embarrassing episode in Woody Allen's career, a feeble struggle to escape from his more authentic self, an incredible concession to the snobbish misgiving that comedy is an inferior art. (p. 64)